e-conomic Hackathon 2013: Competing, collaborating and being creative

September 17, 2013

This year, we saw an even greater interest in the event throughout the company, with more teams participating and people from all parts of the organization working together to see who could create the best ‘hack’ for our products.

Similar to last year, each team was handpicked to include people from different departments and with different skills to ensure cross-departmental collaboration and to allow team members to learn about different approaches to our products.

The mission for each team was to come up with the most valuable improvement to either the e-conomic application, the Debitoor software – which we launched last year – or the brand-new REST API that we’re still working on.

And they were only given a single day to produce a winning improvement, with entries accepted by midnight at the latest!

Reaping the rewards

After submitting their entries – and getting some much needed sleep – teams got up the next day to present their work to the entire organization.

There were some really great ideas from the teams, with a common theme being suggestions for making life easier for our users, e.g. through easier workflows, improved assistance, better overview, etc.

The quality and readiness of the features were very high, and we will definitely be looking to add a lot of the improvements to our products – just like we did last year when Hackathon features such as discounts for customers and customer groups, resending documents directly from customer ledger cards, drill-down on selected reports and many others were released as part of our regular product updates.

For us in the Hackathon voting panel, deciding who to award proved quite difficult, but in the end we came up with a number of runner-up mentions and special awards in addition to the main prize to allow us to honor most of the teams for their great work.

We’re now starting the process of further evaluating and refining the features created by the teams in order to make the improvements available to our customers.

This way, there are benefits for everyone from the Hackathon: The team members and everyone else involved get a better understanding of each other and our products, and we’re able to provide some extra value to our customers at the same time.